A few weeks ago, I came across an article on Hackaday about memory mapped IO, and the sorts of toggle speeds you can achieve on the Beaglebone’s output pins when using this technique as opposed to just using the file access API. Around the same time, I was reading some articles on Pulse Density Modulation (as opposed to Pulse Width Modulation) for another project I was working on; in an attempt to increase the slew rate of a low-pass filter on the output of a microcontroller I was using.

Had a little extra time in-between half-yearly exams — so I had a crack at doing some canvas stuff in Javascript:

Code’s probably not perfect (web development has never really been my forte) – but I’m yet to find any serious bugs so no matter, it works :D — Only about 250 lines, too. Tested in Firefox and Chrome, supports iOS and android browsers too with touch. Not sure if it works in IE, heh.

Mechanics are similar to Super Hexagon’s, except the difficulty ramps indefinitely and there aren’t any patterns – the field is completely random. If anyone’s

A natural extension on some of the javascript stuff I’ve worked on (Details on some of the 3D math is found there), I spent a short while piecing together a library and demo code that can render any standard .obj 3D model as ascii text; using mostly C++ and a little python.

I’m not sure exactly what a practical use of this would be, but I was thinking maybe along the lines of fancy console loading screens, viewing models on remote servers; etc.

This is a pretty visual project so I put together a little video demo:

Not so uber

The UberDrive (as I like to call it) is completely cross-OS USB-compliant storage device – and can store a whopping 7 kilobytes of data. Admittedly this was never really a ‘project’; more so a result of a couple of hours’ fiddling around. Basically, I worked off of the back of one of microchip’s CDC storage class demos, flipped the config switches so that it would run on my model PIC (24FJ64GB002)instead of what it was designed for and modified the device name. Then I dissected an old USB cable, breaking it out into headers so that

UPDATE: This thing’s now on IndieGogo! The below material is severely outdated :)

Overview

Metanact is a fast-paced 2D spaceshooter whereby the game is played in the user’s filesystem – directories and files are each displayed as in-game objects. As this is an HSC project of mine, I’m unsure of the rules associated with distributing source-code, documentation etc; basically – I’ll keep much of it under wraps until the project is handed in — probably around October this year. Without doing too much harm, the game is written in C++, uses SFML for rendering and media and depends on Boost

Probably not something which increases my employment prospects, I thought I should stick this up here. Anyway, myself and a bunch of friends roll dice and pretend to destroy plastic every second Sunday. For anyone who’s familiar with 40k, I play Necrons and over the years have accumulated a little over 2000 points of the time-absorbing buggers. Against a nice backdrop of computing books so that I don’t forget my priorities, a picture:

Of course, I usually have the little guys packed up in boxes so visitors aren’t confronted by their deadly beauty too much.

A new platform

With all the buzz surrounding the raspberry pi (an arm-based embedded Linux platform) at the time of it’s release, I decided to buy one. After fiddling around with the Wheezy terminal and checking out a few applications, I decided to write a game for it. As a challenge, I decided to use C++ and have the thing be hardware accelerated. After thinking for a short while and sketching some mockups in Photoshop, a breakout clone was decided upon; and so began research into libraries to assist me.